Pureed foods

You have to add some cooked  veggies like carrots, broccoli,cauliflower,spinach  or green beans to your meats to make them look more appealing.

Make the puree meat into a chop steak or cutlet shape .Put the veges through a pastry beg with star tube for eye appeal.. Or put in a timbale mold.  Garnish the plate nicely and dust with fresh chopped parsly

Also don't forget that pureed foods can also be more heavily spiced and / or coloured to make appealing.

 

ie. - pureed apple is just kinda 'meh;

puree that apple with a heavy hand of apple pie spices, darkly baked pie dough, some red annatto for colour and you have some tasty paste!

 

Ground beef can be a great thing also if you cook it right and present it in a manner that doesn't shock the hell out of the customer.

 

ie. Shepherds Pie / Cottage Pie:

-Cook extra finely ground lean beef with some baking soda and water. (this will soften the meat a whole lot - use 1/4 tsp per pound of meat and at least 1 cup of water per pound of beef.

-Once beef is well cooked and all the moisture has been driven off - put a stick blender on it and make it super smooth, or use an alternate method.

- Season the hell out of the beef, you really need to be heavy handed here, beef base, garlic, everything including the kitchen sink if you need to.  Think beef jerky puree, super savoury and strong (not too salty though).

-Make mashed potatoes, even powdered will be fine - just use lots of butter and whole milk, maybe a touch of spice (nutmeg etc.)  This is the balancing point to the super strong beef.

- Make a corn puree reduction (cream corn blended and passed thru a tamis after thickening)

- Make a pea puree reduction with a few added onions (frozen peas are just fine, cooked / blended passed thru a tamis) 

 

Adjust the seasoning on each one of the above, if you won't taste it then you should never serve it!

 

Take and plate some of the ground beef in a ramekin or whatever floats your boat.  Then use a small piping bag to make little dots of "peas and corn" on top of the beef.   Then pipe  the mashed on top.

 

You can't brown it off in the oven so you will have to make it pretty again.   A bit of smoked paprika, maybe some finely ground dried cheese.

 

Anyway I hope this helps you to get your creative juices flowing.

 

Don't hesitate to let us know how things go and keep asking questions.

 

Mike

Back when I was in school, one of my teachers shared an article with me that featured a chef from some fancy retirement home. His thing was pureed foods. He used pastry bags and molds to make the food look like whatever they used to be. Sorry, but I can't remember the title or publication, but it may be out there some where. His dishes where well composed, and honestly, looked like something I would like to eat.
Edited by Sparkie - 11/11/12 at 6:22pm

If you have some extra money, JB Prince has an extensive line of molds of different shapes. I'm sure there are other companies as well. Some techniques from molecular gastronomy may help since appearance is the issue. As long as you are putting maple syrup on the food, how about putting sugar in all the food just to make everything sweet before you mold and present it? Sweet roast beef would not work for the normal resident but in this case that might be just the thing. Whatever you come up with, this sounds like an interesting and unusual challenge.

I don't think the dietitian would view this as the answer to the problem. All that sugar might promote weight gain .

While taste buds diminish with the elderly, finding ways to serve food ie: proper balance of color, shape , texture, taste, all of these come into play when making food, even with us, sometimes adding different spices to the food might invoke a childhood memory, so working with nutmeg, cinnamon, rosemary, terragon and or essential oils will help as well.

 

As far as molds go , there is a website called www.pureefoodsmolds.com maybe they have something .....

 

You will find some good info at wardipedia.org .

 

Another website you may want to look at is theartandarchitectureofpuree.com  .

 

Just some thoughts.

 

Petals.